Online ISSN 2286-0266
Print ISSN 1223-0685
© 2025 Œconomica by ASE & SOREC
 
Anthony FRIEND
OIKO, Ottawa
This paper employs the concept of entropy production to integrate natural and economic production, consumption and capital accumulation. The System of National Accounts (SNA) is incomplete within the range of joint economic-environment production nor is it integratible system with respect to the larger-scale ecosystem production functions, (i.e., agriculture, forestry, fisheries etc.,), (Friend, 2003, Bartelmus, 2004). The accounting identities of the SNA, in this sense, is a special case of a institutional economy, exemplified in a market-driven (demand) and a market-priced (supply) economy. Further exacerbated by collapsing the natural production cycles into the arbitrary Procrustean Bed of the Walrasian general equilibrium system, exemplified by GDP. The SNA, in context of incompleteness, is a sub-set of SAGE-P’s boundary conditions of a continuous global production space, (Böhm Bawerk, 1891, Sraffa, 1960, Georgescu-Roegen, 1971). The accounts describe a mapping of the natural production cycle, referred to as the ‘material cause,’ onto a descriptive I/O model of the economy, referred to as the ‘formal cause,’ (Rosen, 1991). The accounting identities are subject to thermodynamic production boundaries enabling, inter alia, the supply-demand inequalities characterized as the emergent properties of dissipative structures, (Prigogine, 1997). Thus, allowing for the statistical analysis of economic performance in terms of a formalized system of causal entailments and recursive functions. In other words, SAGE-P provides a well-integrated conservation measure of the economy supported by the theoretical frameworks of Georgescu-Roegen’s flow-fund model of the economic process, (see Appendix). The putative source SAGE-P is the classical ‘provisioning economy’ superimposed on the Aristotelian Oikonomia. The SNA, a child of the underutilized resource economies of the 1930s, served well the postwar years of economic policy aimed at stimulating growth in GDP. However, from about the 1970s onwards there is increasing evidence that the marginal benefit-cost of GDP growth, at least in high income societies, is fast approaching zero-sum, if not negative-sum, (Mill, 1985, Boulding, 1966, Mishan, 1967, Hueting, 1980). SAGE-P offers a use-value conservation accounting which, when applied to global limit functions, is a measure of the socially acceptable rate of entropy production, (Mayumi, 2001).

ŒCONOMICA nr. 4/2006
Sistemul de Contabilitate pentru Producţia Entropică Globală (SAGE-P): imaginea în oglindă a PIB